Spring 2021Spring 2021

Chair’s Letter

PHILOSOPHYPHILOSOPHYDEPARTMENT DEPARTMENT NEWSLETTERNEWSLETTER

Table of Contents

Letter from the Chair ................. 1

Faculty Updates .....................2–3

In Memory: Bill Wainwright ........ 3

Department History ................... 4

Student News ........................... 5

New Graduates ........................ 5

Retirements ............................6–7

In Memory: Fabrizio Mondadori .. 7

Dear Friends and Alumni,

Welcome to the second UWM Philosophy Newsletter. Herein we aim to inform you about what we are up to, how things fare for philosophy in Milwaukee, and the like.

First of all, I would like to thank you for the positive feedback on our first Newsletter. (Some representative comments: “Love the Newsletter”; “This is a fantastic idea … Thanks for sending it”; “I am pleased to see that philosophy is alive and well at UW Milwaukee”; “I’m glad you guys put this together!”). We very much appreciate your kind words!

So how have things been here since late autumn 2019? Obviously 2020 was an enormously difficult year for the entire world. Like universities everywhere, the pandemic forced UWM to move online halfway through the spring term. By the end of March nearly everyone at the university was working remotely, a situation that will continue (more or less) until the end of summer 2021.

The pandemic has exacerbated the difficult position in which the Department (and UWM more generally) has found itself in recent years. Over the past dozen years, long-term demographic trends have reduced UWM’s student population by well over twenty percent. At the same time there has been a dramatic decline in public support for education in Wisconsin.

Our faculty now is half the size it was a mere decade ago. Two more of our long-time members –Michael Liston and Richard Tierney – will have retired by this summer. (Michael retired in January and Richard will be retiring at the end of May.) Our vital Program Assistant, Georgette Jaworski, also will be retiring at the end of the term. The Department will be very different in autumn 2021.

Despite these challenges, the quality of our teaching and research remains top-notch. We attract many of the strongest undergraduate students at UWM. I am amazed regularly at the excellent work they do. Many are active in our dynamic Philosophy Club, which has been supported enthusiastically by Dr. Ágúst Magnússon in recent years. Our MA program continues to attract impressive students from around the world. They regularly find places in top Philosophy PhD programs (including recently: Brown University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Arizona, the University of California – Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, and Stanford University).

Our faculty keeps producing cutting-edge work in philosophy, with publications at leading academic journals and presses. And while we have lost many faculty members in recent years (to retirement or positions elsewhere), we are pleased to have Nataliya Palatnik join us in a tenure-track position. Nataliya received her MA from UWM before going to Harvard for her PhD. She then was a Visiting Assistant Professor at UWM for a number of years. I’m delighted that, as of fall 2020, she is a long-term member of our faculty.

A generous gift from Brad and Glenna Brin had enabled the Department to host a number of conferences and special events at UWM before the pandemic. We hope to resume holding such events in the latter part of this year or early 2022. For information on forthcoming talks, please see: https://uwm.edu/philosophy/category/colloquia/.

My term as Chair will end August 2021. It has been an honour to serve the Department in this role. I am delighted (and relieved!) to announce that Joshua Spencer will be the next Chair.

Finally, my profound thanks to Aaron Kruk, Georgette Jaworski, and Natachia Attewell for their hard work in helping to put this Newsletter together.

Blain Neufeld, Associate Professor and Chair

Contact UsIn future issues, we hope to report alumni news in this space. If you are an alumna or alumnus of our programs, and you have news from your professional life, please contact us!

Send your news to Joshua Spencer at spence48@uwm.edu. He’ll keep it in a folder, and, when it comes time to publish the next issue, we’ll report your news to the community in this space. Thanks!

2 University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee 3Department of Philosophy | Spring 2021

Faculty Updates

Margaret AthertonI am still enjoying retirement if nothing else about the stressful year we have been and are going through. I am keeping busy. I delivered a talk via Zoom to the Early Modern Philosophers of the University of Toronto and environs on Berkeley on Agency, and my recently published book, “Berkeley,” will be the subject of an Author Meets Critics session

at the Eastern APA. I had a review of “Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosopohical Thought” edited by Eileen O’Neill and Marcy Lescano, published in the Journal of the History of Philosophy. I have some things languishing in the pipeline although I have heard rumors that Springer is about to disgorge a paper of mine called “The Consequences of the Consequences of the Principles for the Theory of the Principles” in a volume called Empiricist Theories of Space, edited by Laura Berchielli. I am also enjoying seeing former colleagues and students at the Philosophy Department Reading Group.

Miren BoehmIn the past year, I have published two book reviews: one in Hume Studies on Tamas Demeter’s David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism: Methodology and Ideology in Enlightenment Enquiry and the other in the Journal of the History of Philosophy on David Landy’s Hume’s Science of Human Nature: Scientific Realism, Reason, and Substantial Explanation. I also published my article “Hume’s “Projectivism” Explained” in Synthese. In it, I offer a novel interpretation of how the process Hume refers to as “spreading the mind onto the world” happens. Hume appeals to this process to explain the appearance of perceived objective causation, moral and aesthetic properties. I have a number of papers in the works for this year: “Rabbit Without a Cause”, commissioned for an Oxford collection on Mary Shepherd’s philosophy, in which I offer an interpretation of Shepherd’s criticism of Hume’s treatment of the causal maxim: every beginning of existence must have a cause; “Hume on Time and Timelessness”; and a book review on Qu Hsueh’s Hume’s Epistemological Evolution which I will submit to the Journal of the History of Philosophy. As for conferences, last March I gave comments at the Central APA (Chicago) on Maite Cruz’s “Hume on Temporal Experience”. This year, I am one of the critics for the Author Meets Critics Book Panel, Eastern APA, New York City on the aforementioned book by Qu Hsueh. If pandemic conditions greatly improve, I will present my paper on Hume’s projectivism at the Hume International meeting in July which will take place in Bogota, Colombia. I am also doing a (virtual) presentation at San Francisco State University in April.

Bill BristowAnother year has passed already. That’s embarrassing. In this past year, research-wise, I have completed a draft of a paper on the role of the critical attitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and I have started working in earnest on a project focused on the concept of experience in Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Peter van ElswykThis past year has been a busy one. I’ve had six different articles published or accepted for publication: “Representing knowledge” in Philosophical Review; “Generic animalism” (with Andrew Bailey) in Journal of Philosophy; “Why animalism matters” (with Andrew Bailey, Allison Thornton) in Philosophical Studies; “Reviving the

performative hypothesis?” in Thought; “Hedging and the ignorance norm on inquiry” (With Yasha Sapir) in Synthese; and a review of Weaver and Scharp’s Semantics for Reasons (with Daniel Fogal) in Ethics. I’ve given two presentations: “Hedging” at Northern Illinois University in October 2019 and “Hedging and settled inquiry” (with Yasha Sapir) at Agnes Scott College in March 2020. I’m at the start of a sprawling monograph on hedging. It’ll offer a new framework with which to understand the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic terms that can be used to hedge, identify the epistemic role of hedging in transmitting true beliefs, and detail how hedging is connected to intellectual virtues like humility and honesty. These topics might seem to some disjoint, but my proposal tightly integrates them.

Matt KnachelDuring the election season, with memorably bad arguments swirling all around, I’ve been working on the second edition of my open-access logic textbook, Fundamental Methods of Logic, which, to my great satisfaction, has been adopted by many university instructors and continues to be downloaded by people all over the world. In my spare time, I’ve been thinking a lot about Karl Marx lately, for reasons that I suppose are obvious.

John KoetheMy poetry book, Walking Backwards: Poems 1966- 2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was widely reviewed in places like The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Raritan, Threepenny Review, Hyperallergic and The Georgia Review, and a new book of poems, Beyond Belief, will

be published by FSG in 2022.

Michael ListonI spent much of the past year moving my courses from pre-pandemic face-to-face delivery to post-pandemic synchronous online delivery. After much deliberation, I have decided to retire at the end of Fall Semester 2020. However, I will continue to work informally with graduate students and to complete some work in progress in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. Other than that, I plan to pursue some long-deferred goals, like relearning the language of my ancestors, and to enjoy just being idle for a change. Farewell to you all.

Blain NeufeldOver the past year I tried to finish up my book manuscript, Public Reason and Political Autonomy: Realizing the Ideal of a Civic People. I’m almost there – only three years behind schedule! Hopefully it will be published by Routledge later this year. My chapter, “Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education,” was published in The Palgrave Handbook

of Citizenship and Education in 2020. And my review of Daniel Halliday’s excellent book on inheritance was published recently at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-and-the-right-to-bequeath/). Throughout 2021 I will be working with Lori Watson (Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis) and Micah Schwartzman (Law, University of Virginia) to organize a conference in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The conference hopefully will take place at the University of Virginia Law School in early December.

Bob SchwartzMy paper, “Berkeleian Instrumentalism: From Substance to Space,” has just been published in a volume of Empiricist Theories of Space.

Joshua SpencerI continue to be the resident metaphysician here at UWM. If you are interested in the nature of reality or in whether anything is made of the lint in my pocket and the waxing moon, I

am here to help you in your investigations. Like everyone else in our department, I have spent the last several months working from home. My cats have decided that they are a crucial part of each of my video conferences. My trip to the biennial Metaphysics on the Mountain Conference was cancelled, but the conference went online. Despite the craziness of this last year, I have been able to get a bit of research done. I published my paper, “The Limits of Neo-Aristotelian Plenitude”, in the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. I also published “Advanced D&D” (with Chris Tillman) as part of a book symposium in Analysis on Dan Korman’s wonderful book, Objects: Nothing out of the Ordinary. And I published a book review of Kris McDaniel’s book, The Fragmentation of Being, in Mind. I am continuing to work on my paper on poverty and some papers on the nature of composition. This last summer, I was happy to receive an Advanced Research and Creativity (ARC) grant from UWM to support my work on the nature of composition.

The Department honors and remembers Distinguished Professor Emeritus Bill Wainwright, who passed away peacefully on November 5th at the age of 85.

Bill was an indispensable member of UWM practically since its inception. He first came to the university as an assistant professor in 1968, only twelve years after it was officially founded. He joined a still emerging Philosophy Department and immediately began working towards what would become defining contributions to both the Department and university. In 1969, he co-founded the Comparative Study of Religion program which has since evolved into the degree-granting Religious Studies program with more than twenty-five contributing departments. By the early 1970s, Bill was appointed Chair of the Philosophy Department and would later serve as Chair of Graduate Studies in the 1980s. Under his leadership, the Department flourished. He recruited a range of talented professors who would become the cornerstone of the Department and helped bring the Department national recognition for its philosophical scholarship and superb PhD preparation through its terminal MA program.

Beyond his pedagogical contributions, Bill’s reputation as a preeminent philosopher of religion was invaluable to UWM’s scholarly stature. During his tenure at the university, he published nine books, 24 book chapters, 31 academic journal articles, 35 book reviews and had given 65 talks at top-level national and international venues. Even after retirement in 2003, he would continue contributing to academia, publishing two additional books, 28 articles and giving 26 presentations. He won three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and served on top-level committees of the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Christian Philosophers, and the American Philosophical Association. His prestige inside of the discipline eventually led to him being appointed editor of Faith and Philosophy, the premier journal of philosophy of religion, where he served from 1995 till 2000. In 2014, in light of his incredible academic achievements and service to the university, he received the Ernest Spaights Plaza Award, given to those who have made “significant, enduring and institution-wide contributions to the growth, development and mission of the university”. The award is the highest honor bestowed on any member of UWM’s community.

Perhaps most of all, Bill will be remembered for who he was beyond his scholarly achievements. He was known by those in the Department for his congeniality, reasonableness and humility. He was loved by his students – so much that he received an Outstanding Teaching Award in1990. He was committed to service and social responsibility, making generous contributions to the Sojourner Truth House, Hunger Task Force and Planned Parenthood, among others. And he faithfully held a lifelong commitment to the arts, humanities and higher education. He will be dearly missed by the UWM community.

For those interested in honoring Bill, his family has requested that donations be made to Sojourner Family Peace Center Milwaukee or to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church (Downer Avenue).

In Memory: Bill Wainwright

4 University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee 5Department of Philosophy | Spring 2021

2020 Richard Peltz Award WinnersThis year the Department celebrated three winners of the Peltz Award for Excellence in Philosophy. The first was undergraduate Robert Schreiner for his paper, “Freud on Freedom: Determinism in Psycho-analysis and the Paradox of Agency.” In the paper, he analyzes the philosophical nuances in Freud’s writings and offers a comparative analysis of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory with his writings on psycho-analytic practice. The first of two graduate winners was Josiah Lopez-Wild for his paper, “Lewis and the Poisoned Pawn.” The paper considers whether pos-

sibility is grounded in what’s actual, as Adam Morton and UWM philosopher Fabrizio Mondadori argue, or, as David Lewis contends, in alternative possible worlds. In it, Josiah defends Lewis’ claim that the two grounds of possibility are consistent. The other graduate winner was Farhad Taraz for his paper, “How Code Words Work.” The paper examines ‘code words’ and how they function in con-temporary political speech. He explains why contemporary accounts of such speech fail to adequately explain all of the primary qualities of code words, subsequently providing his own account.

Department History:UWM Philosopher Dr. Cornelius Golightly

Dr. Cornelius Golightly was the first Black faculty member of the Philosophy Department at UWM. He originally was a member of the University of Wisconsin Extension College in Milwaukee which was one of the two schools that merged to become UWM in 1955. He remained a member of the Department of Philosophy until 1969 when he took a job at Wayne State University as Associate Dean and Professor of Philosophy.

During his time at UWM, Dr. Golightly was a scholar, activist, and public philosopher. He published in top tier philosophy journals such as the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, Philosophy of Science, The Monist, and the like. His academic work addressed philosophical topics of interest at the time (e.g., Mind-body Causation, The James Lange theory of emotion). Writings in more public venues engaged matters of concern to the Black educational community. While in Milwaukee he was very active in public education. He was the first African American elected to the Milwaukee School Board. Dr. Golightly fought to introduce busing to promote the integration of Black students into schools throughout the city, and in the early 1960s he advocated for a federally sponsored free breakfast program for poor students. Unfortunately, both efforts were thwarted.

There is a biography of Cornelius Golightly at Black Past: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/dr-cornelius-golightly-1917-1976-life-academic-and-public-intellectual/

Here is a partial bibliography of Dr. Golightly’s work (compiled by Margaret Atherton):

1941 Thought and Language in Whitehead’s Categories, Doctoral Dissertaion, University of Michigan

1942 “Negro Higher Education and Democratic Negro Morale”, The Journal of Negro Education

1942 “England in East Africa”

1945 “The Psychopathology of Crime”, The Journal of Negro Education

1945 “Negro Employment in the Federal Government” JADavis, CL Golightly, Phylon.

1947 “Race, Values and Guilt”, Social Forces

1947 “Social Science and Normative Ethics”, The Journal of Philosophy

1951 “Inquiry and Whitehead’s Schematic Method”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

1952 “Mind-body, causation and correlation”, Philosophy of Science

1952 “Legerdemain in Ethics”, The Philosophical Review

1953 “The James-Lange theory: a logical post-mortem”, Philosophy of Science

1955 “On Scientific Inference”, The Midwest Sociologist

1956 “Value as a Scientific Concept”, The Journal of Philosophy

1963 “De Facto Segregation in Milwaukee Schools”, Integrated Education

1968 “The Negro and Respect for the Law”, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, April 25, 1968

1971 “A Philosopher’s view of values and ethics”, The Personnel and Guidance Journal

1972 “Ethics and Moral Activism”, The Monist

1974 “Justice and ‘Discrimination For’ in Higher Education”, Philosophic Exchange

The Philosophy Club – the undergraduate student organization for philosophy – continued to grow and flourish in the past academic year. The club successfully moved its meetings to an online format in Spring, due to the pandemic, and continued to provide a vibrant and exciting community for philosophical discussions. The club holds bi-weekly meetings that usually have between 15 and 30 participants. Meetings have included discussions of Plato’s theory of forms, the philosophy of Star Wars, an in-depth presentation on current research in philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of happiness. The club also regularly screens interesting films and television series – such as Black Mirror and The Midnight Gospel – followed by philosophical discussions.

Sincere thanks to the dedicated officers of the club who have kept the organization running through these difficult times: Caleb James Hawkins (club president), Ryan Fields, Joshua Rainer Rangai, Brandon Malik Williford, and Genevieve Harper.

The Philosophy Club Update

2nd Year MA Students’ WorkMark Dickson – I have recently had four papers accepted for presentation at various conferences. The first, “Access Denied: A Proto-Kantian Interpretation of Lockean Primary and Secondary Qualities”, is for the 2021 International John Locke Society Conference (Main Program), Naples, Italy. The next, “Dispositional Metaphysics of Belief and the Constitution / Causation Dilemma”, was for the 2020 Arché Graduate Conference, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK which has been postponed to 2021. The last two – “Conflicting Commitments: A Potential Incoherence in Christian Philosophy”, for the 2020 Christian Philosophy: Past, Present, and Future (Main Program), Jesuit University Ignatianum, Krakow, Poland, and “Locke’s Colors Within His Mental Inquiry” for the 2020 International John Locke Society Conference (Main Program), Naples, Italy – were accepted but not presented due to pandemic cancellations. I also received the Distinguished Graduate Student Fellowship from the university and received a full scholarship to attend the “Virtue and Autonomy” philosophy workshop in 2020.

Zach Ferguson – This past year my paper, “A song turned sideways would sound as sweet” was accepted and released online in September in Analysis. It was accepted last semester. In it, I consider whether the aesthetic value of music tell us anything about the nature of spacetime and whether you can turn a song sideways in time. I argue there is nothing wrong with sideways music (at least, there wouldn’t be if sideways music were real). I also presented my paper “Debating convergence justification’s classical tilt” in the Binghamton SPEL Graduate Philosophy Conference where it was one of three nominated for a Best Student Paper Award. Those who defend convergence accounts of public justification often argue that political liberalism tends toward a capitalistic market economy with low levels of taxation, redistribution, and welfare. In the paper, I argue that either more redistributive proposals will be justified if we want to solve collective action problems and minimize state coercion, or no laws will be justified at all. Even the convergence theorist will prefer the first option.

Student News

Sarae LighthartTai Clazmer

Farhad Taraz

2020 Masters of Arts GraduatesOur 2020 cohort consisted of six students who all have gone on to pursue PhDs in philosophy. Their placement as well as thesis titles are below. We wish them success in their future studies and congratulate them on all that they’ve achieved thus far!

Thomas Ladendorf (Thesis: “Reason and Regret”) joined the PhD program at Stanford University.

William Gamrat (Thesis: “Cognitive Creatures and Conceptuality”) joined the PhD program at University of Illinois,Chicago.

Josiah Lopez-Wild (Thesis: “Lewis and the Poisoned Pawn”) joined the PhD program in Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine.

Erich Jones (Thesis: “A Simple Defence of Monism”) joined the PhD program at Ohio State University.

Joshua Vonderhaar (Thesis: “Liberal Feminism and Cultural Critique”) joined the PhD program at SUNY-Buffalo.

Farhad Taraz (Thesis: “How Code Words Work”) joined the PhD program at Cornell University.

2020 William J. Seidler Scholarship WinnersThe Department recognized three students as win-ners of the William J. Seidler Scholarship. The schol-arship is granted annually to outstanding under-graduate philosophy majors. Our three winners were Sarae Lighthart, Tai Clazmer and Brandon Willi-ford. For Sarae, philosophy encouraged her to return to school after a few gap years between high school and college. She hopes her philosophical education can help her work towards a brighter and more sustainable future in whatever area she winds up in after school. Alongside his philosophical pursuits,

Tai is passionate about social justice and anti-racism initiatives and (on some days) hopes to become a professor. Brandon did not become a philosophy major until his third year but, thanks to encourage-ment and mentorship from Professor Tierney, has found himself at home in the Department. He now hopes to complete an MA and PhD in philosophy. Congratulations to our three scholars!

Rob Schreiner

Photo courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

6 University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee 7Department of Philosophy | Spring 2021

Retirements Michael Liston Professor Michael Liston, who has been a member of our Department since 1986, retired in January of this year. Michael earned undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Law at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and a PhD in Philosophy at UCSD. Prior to coming to UWM, he held a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins.

Michael’s research focused on questions that arise at the intersection of the philosophies of science, mathematics, and language, especially questions about realism and reference. He published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews in these areas. In recent years, his scholarly pursuits shifted toward researching the historical roots of those questions as they arose in late 19th century discussions found in the writings of Duhem, Hertz, Maxwell, and Poincaré. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant and UWM Foundation Research Award for some of this work on Duhem.

Michael contributed significantly to the teaching mission of the department and the university. In addition to teaching upper division and graduate level courses in his research areas, he taught courses in elementary and intermediate logic nearly every year, and from time to time he offered courses in the Honors and Freshman Seminar Programs. He was MA advisor for 30 students and served on numerous MA committees in Philosophy and occasionally on PhD committees in English. He also contributed extensive service. At the department level, he served as Department Chair (1999-2002) and as Chair or member of nearly every other Department committee, and he managed numerous philosophy faculty recruitments. At the College and University level, he was Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education at the Graduate School (2011-2014), and he served on several important College and University committees, including the College of Letters & Science (L&S) Academic Planning and Governance Committee, Bradley Professor Search committees, and L&S Dean Search committees as well as campus-level Academic Program and Curriculum Committee and Academic Planning and Budget Committee. For the community, he offered occasional pro-bono advice on the logic of statutory/judicial language. During his retirement, Michael plans to continue research in philosophy, to stay connected with the department as professor emeritus, and to cultivate the virtues of idleness.

Richard Tierney Associate Professor Richard Tierney will retire from the Department at the end of the current Spring semester. Richard (PhD Columbia) joined the Department in August 2002 from ‘rival’ MA program Western Michigan University (WMU), although there is some speculation that he simply got the acronyms mixed up and decided to stay. He brought with him an expertise in Ancient Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Logic, and regularly taught our core courses in History of Ancient Philosophy and Elementary Logic. His main passion, however, is Aristotle, and he would teach the occasional graduate course on Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics. Most notably, he has published a number of papers on Aristotle’s conception of essence and explanation in demonstrative science in the prestigious Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Richard has been a tireless worker for the Department, acting as Chair for six and a half consecutive years, and serving as Chair of the Course and Curriculum Committee for at least as many, as well as acting as Graduate Advisor.

His teaching and service to the Department will be sorely missed, as will his dry sense of humour. After spending one last beautiful summer in Milwaukee, Richard will return to his homeland of Australia where he plans to write a book on Aristotle’s concept of nature. We wish him well!

Georgette Jaworski RetirementAcademic Department Associate Georgette Jaworski will be retiring at the end of May. She joined the Department in December 2003 and has played an invaluable role in ensuring the smooth operation of the Department ever since. Students, staff, and faculty have all depended on her knowledge, enthusiasm, and amazing work ethic over the past seventeen years. In recognition of her excellent performance over the years, she received an amply deserved University Staff Outstanding Service Award in October 2017.

In reflecting upon her time with the Department, Georgette writes the following:

Choosing to retire was not an easy decision for me, but I am very fortunate to be someone who was given a choice, rather than have that decision forced upon them, due to ill health or other misfortune, so for this I am truly grateful. For someone like me who has been working not only one, but two jobs for most of her life, I know that retirement will be a REALLY big change! My plan is to just continue my usual 8-hour day, but now with more time to focus on activities that will improve my mind and develop my spiritual well-being.

I feel like the luckiest person ever for having had the opportunity to support the hardest working, most dedicated and caring faculty in the world. I leave with so many happy memories of you, and my time working here, that I will treasure forever. As my favorite philosopher (after all of you, of course) Confucius says, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” and I felt the spirit of that wisdom (thanks to you) at my desk every day of my time here. Who could ask for more?

With Deepest Appreciation and Gratitude,Georgette

We all wish Georgette the best for the future!

Steve Leeds Retirement DinnerOn January 24, 2020, friends and colleagues of Steve Leeds gathered at the Maharaja restaurant for a retirement dinner to celebrate his distinguished career in philosophy and to thank him for his many contributions to our programs. Steve was presented with a retirement gift in the form of a donation in his honor to the Jam Rek Foundation, a charity Steve supports which provides educational benefits to students in West Africa, especially Senegal. We wish Steve a very happy and fulfilling retirement.

We, his friends and colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at UWM, sadly report that Fabrizio Mondadori died suddenly at his home on February 15, 2021. We honor, miss, and remember him fondly.

Fabrizio received his PhD at Harvard in 1972, working with Hilary Putnam and David Kaplan. Between 1972 and 1984, he held various academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania, UNAM (Mexico), the University of Auckland (New Zealand), the University of Paris, and the University of Münster. He came to UWM in 1984 and became Professor in 1991.

Fabrizio’s research trajectory began in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of language. His Italian translation of Quine’s Word and Object was published as Parola e oggetto (1970) while he was still a graduate student. His PhD thesis (1972) dealt with modal semantics and determinate names. “Available Properties” (1986) and his ground-breaking Philosophical Review paper (co-authored with Adam Morton, also regrettably recently deceased), “Modal Realism: The Poisoned Pawn” (1976), are very much papers in contemporary philosophy. His work then gradually turned to historical excavation of the roots of modal metaphysics, first in the work of Leibniz – with several important papers in Studia Leibnitiana on essentialism, superessentialism, and compossibility from the mid-1970s onward – and later in the work of Duns Scotus, which increasingly occupied Fabrizio’s scholarly attention from 2000 on. This led to another set of important papers in medieval philosophy, most notably “The Independence of the Possible According to Scotus”, which appeared in the 2005 proceedings of the septcentennial Scotus conference, Duns Scot à Paris 1302-2002. After his retirement in 2014, he continued to publish papers and to work on a book manuscript on Duns Scotus.

Fabrizio’s work consisted of exceptionally close readings of texts and arguments. He read several languages (English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian) and was a skillful reader of the Latin used by Scotus and his commentators. He was the recipient of several awards for his work, including a Humboldt Research Fellowship, and his work was honored at a conference, Themes from Mondadori, held at McGill University in 2008.

His scholarly reputation helped the Department to grow what was to become a premier MA program at UWM, to which Fabrizio contributed by teaching, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, courses in metaphysics and history of philosophy (especially Medieval Philosophy).

Fabrizio had many and diverse interests outside of philosophy. He possessed detailed knowledge of the areas that interested him and held strong opinions about what was good and bad in them. In games and sports, he loved chess, football (the Premier League variety), basketball, and snooker. In art, he loved Mannerism (especially the work of Bronzino); in cinema, he was a huge fan of Peckinpah’s movies, but also of more popular movies like John Carpenter’s or movies featuring Peter Sellars. His musical tastes ranged from Bach and Corelli to Sigur Ros and Dylan. His knowledge and love of literature was immense and ranged from Jorge Luis Borges (whom he read in the original), Brian O’Nolan, and James Kelman; to modern poetry from T.S. Eliot, through the Beats, and John Ashbery; and to horror writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood. He delighted in the etymology of English slang. He loved to travel and simply walk around his favorite cities – Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Buenos Aires – and, upon his return, to regale his friends with tales of his adventures.

Fabrizio was one of a kind, a great conversationalist with a unique sense of humour. He will be sorely missed by his friends at UWM and across the world.

Fabrizio is survived by his wife, Céliane, daughter, Emma, son-in-law, Parker, and grandson, Elio. For those wishing to honor him, his family has requested that donations in his name be made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 501 St. Jude Place, Memphis, TN 38105 or at https://www.stjude.org/donate/donate-to-st-jude.html

In Memory: Fabrizio Mondadori

Department of Philosophy | Fall 2019 8

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